Facebook suspends Daily Caller journalist over Sylville Smith meme

On Wednesday, the Daily Caller’s David Hookstead said Facebook suspended his account for 24 hours over a meme of Sylville Smith, the armed black man shot and killed by police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The meme, he explained, showed Smith holding a Glock with the caption, “2nd Place Milwaukee, WI Quick Draw Competition.” The picture, he said, is “blowing up” on Reddit, so he posted it on a Facebook page he ran in college with a group of friends.

The picture in question can be seen below:

Via Reddit

“Soon my personal account was suspended pending review, and there is the possibility it will be banned forever,” he wrote.

Hookstead added:

Smith was shot and killed after pulling a gun on Milwaukee police officers, and refusing to put it down.

So until further notice I’m sitting in Facebook prison, and Facebook’s reputation of censoring conservative views continues to grow.

Incidents like this, by the way, are the reason Adina Kutnicki, an investigative journalist based in Israel, and I wrote “Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad.” That book is set to be published in September.

These incidents are also the reason I am working on a new site dedicated to censorship and the abuse meted out by social media sites. We’ll have more on that as the site progresses.

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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